Ghost? Buffoon? Dad!
by TFSyndicate
Summary: Set in an AU where Jack saves Vlad from the proto Portal and becomes the first Halfa himself.
1. Chapter 1

Saturday night. Danny, for once, had nothing important to do. His homework was done and the ghosts were behaving. His parents were downstairs doing stuff. (Never mind whether or they not they know about Danny being a halfa: this story isn't _about_ them.) Then an idea struck him like a sock full of quarters: He'll go see Clockwork!

Before he could stand up from his bed, Danny was blinked out of existence...teleporting straight to Clockwork's realm. Before him was the rear a huge red chair, with Clockwork himself no doubt on the other side, watching a wall full of television screens at once.

"I take it you sensed I was bored and wanted to see you," said Danny.

"That's right, Phantom," said Clockwork, dark yet welcoming, "Make yourself at home."

Danny looked at the wall of television screens that Clockwork was watching. He noticed that many of them were different Dannys from different timelines. A large screen in the center was the one that Clockwork directed his attention towards. This one had Danny...Phantom, mind you...being hugged and smothered by his parents. They must've took it well.

"Did this already happen in another timeline?" Danny queried.

"Maybe it just happened, maybe it will happen. All as it should be for this Danny, though."

Another ideal thought came to Danny's mind right then and there.

"Clockwork," Danny began, "Is there a timeline where Vlad _wasn't_ hit by the proto Portal back in college?"

"Could you be more specific?" said Clockwork, "I know several where there wasn't a portal at all."

"Okay...how about one where Vlad isn't a fruit loop...because someone else was hit by the proto Portal instead?"

"That's one of my favorites," Clockwork, delighted, turned younger as he spoke, "Have a seat. We can watch it together."

Clockwork aimed his clock staff at the center screen, and, after a beam of ectoplasm or electricity or whatever, changed to the timeline in question.

* * *

Jack and Maddie savored the intensity and awe of their creation that is the proto Portal from afar. Vlad, however, chose to observe it up close. But Vlad's big (at the time) head was in the way of Jack's view.

"Vlad, could you move a bit to the right?" said Jack.

"Why should I?" said Vlad, "I could've had a part in making this too, y'know."

"Just move, Vlad," said Maddie.

That did the trick. It was no secret among their classmates at the University that Vlad had a thing for Maddie.

Then ectoplasm hit the fan. The portal started acting up...and a large beam of ectoplasm-and-electricity shot out of the portal, past Vlad, and straight into Jack, knocking him over and out cold.

Jack woke up a few hours later in a hospital bed. Standing beside him was the love of his life that was Maddie, and Vlad.

"Jack!" said Maddie, "You're awake!" A hug ensued.

"Ugh...Maddie...what happened?" said Jack, tired.

"Well, Jack," Maddie sighed, "The portal did a number on you...and then it exploded."

"So...back to the drawing board?"

"That's not all Jack. While you were unconscious...you looked...different. I mean, your long black mullet turned into a white one. And your lab coat turned black. I tried to pick you up, so did Vlad, but our hands...they went right through you!"

"What?" Jack was at an otherwise loss for words.

"After a while, don't ask me how, but you turned back to normal, and I was able to carry you onto the gurney, and here you are."

Jack's eyes opened wide, "I did _what_ now?"

Before Maddie or Vlad could answer, a doctor entered with a paper full of test results in one hand.

"Here are the results of your blood test, Mr. Fenton," said the doctor, "Apparently your blood has been...contaminated as a result of the explosion. Could you tell me again what it was you were doing?"

The doctor waited a bit for Jack to gain the strength he needed for his explanation. Then he began.

"Yes. Maddie and I...and Vlad...were attempting to create a portal that could link our world with that of the dead."

"Woah," said the doctor, "I think that answered more questions that I had prepared. Mr. Fenton, there is _ectoplasm_ mixed in with your blood!"

That alone explained why Maddie and Vlad saw his hair white and his coat black while he was knocked out! Jack could turn into a _ghost_!

As the doctor left the room, Maddie reached forward and gave Jack a soft kiss. Vlad started to shed a tear, but held it back. The realization dawned on him: Maddie loved Jack, no matter _what_ happened to him, and he had to respect that. After all, he couldn't help but feel that Jack knew from the start that the Portal was going to backfire. But he had to be sure.

As he finished up his thoughts, he noticed that he was the last one in the room, Maddie having already up and left.

"Jack," said Vlad, "When you told me to step aside before the Portal acted up, did you _know_ that it was going to happen?"

Jack was still tired, so he needed a bit to think about the question asked. Then he shrugged and nodded.

"I...guess so."

"In any rate," said Vlad, "Thank you...for saving my life. I don't know what would've happened had it been me caught up in that beam. For all we know, I could've straight up _died_!"

Jack grew more and more tired, and started to fall asleep again. Another doctor entered the room, telling Vlad that visiting hours will be over in a few minutes. Vlad stood up. Heading straight for the door, he turned around to take one final look at the colleague he could no longer see as a rival, and uttered four last words before leaving Jack alone for the rest of the day.

"I owe you one."


	2. Chapter 2

Jack had a speedy recovery, and was well enough to finish his classwork in time before the semester ended. The whole time, though, he thought about what Vlad said to him: how he suspected that Jack knew about the impending doom. Why else would he and Maddie tell Vlad to move aside while Jack took the hit instead? To that end, during the break, he conducted some tests on himself, both by himself and with the assistance of other doctors, Vlad and Maddie. In the end, it was certain that Jack has ESP. He could pull a phone out of a pocket just as would it start to ring. He could answer a door before the person on the other side had a chance to ring the doorbell. Further tests concluded that the ectoplasm in his blood and DNA helped to amplify this ability.

Maddie remained by his side throughout the whole ordeal. So was Vlad. After Jack and Maddie got married not long after graduation, Vlad, a self-made man, gave them his old brownstone house in Amity Park: a town where ghost activity was high. Seeing that Jack was a half-ghost, Vlad figured he would fit in well with the supernatural crowd that lived there. After all, he owed the guy for saving his life!

Jack originally made the portal to try and get ghosts to come out, so he can hunt them down and put them back in. But since the accident, he had a change of heart. He was part ghost, therefore, hunting ghosts would be the same as hunting (half of) his own kind…I think. When he and Maddie moved in to their new Amity Park home, he made it a long-term mission to get humans and ghosts to be able to co-exist in peace or whatever.

To his surprise, many of the Amity Park ghosts already knew who he was. Word travels fast in the "Ghost Zone". As it turns out, Jack was the very first of his kind—something the ghosts called a "halfa", shorthand for half-a-human, half-a-ghost. Frostbite, a ghost from an area in the Ghost Zone called the 'Far Frozen', prophesied the dawning of a halfa for decades, and that some day he will bring about peace between the living and the dead. Jack was flattered, and allowed the ghosts to stop by and worship him, until his fifteen minutes ran out and they reduced to treating him like everybody else in the area.

* * *

In the subsequent years, Jack and Maddie had two children, Danny and Jazz. They were both half-ghost, just like their dad. The kids themselves didn't know about their powers, nor did they ever use them beforehand (even by accident), until they had to have it explicitly spelled out to them by their parents. It happened one night, when Danny was around 10 and Jazz a year or so older.

"Children," said Maddie sitting before them in the living room, "I suppose you are wondering who that glowing man was that you saw me in bed with last night."

"Who was it, Mommy?" said Danny.

Maddie sighed, "It was your father."

Danny was shocked in disbelief. Jazz was emotionless.

"NO!" Danny interjected, "It couldn't be Daddy. That's the same excuse you made when I saw you kissing Santa Claus."

"Danny," said Jazz, "That was Dad too." Jazz, being the elder child, was naturally the more understanding of the two.

"Besides, you two both know that we don't believe in Santa Claus," said Maddie.

Jack's voice sounded from the far end of the room, "I DO!"

"Anyway," Maddie cleared her throat, "Your father is what they call a halfa. Half man, half ghost."

At last Jazz's face showed signs of significant expression. Danny turned awestruck.

"Daddy's a ghost?" the children said in disbelief and excitement, respectively.

"In a way, yes. And when we had you, the ectoplasm in his DNA and blood…were carried over to you."

Jazz returned to straight up no-nonsense disbelief, "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard."

But Danny was quite the opposite: "We can turn into ghosts!"

Maddie smiled, "Jazz, did you or Danny ever disappear into thin air or walk through walls without knowing what you were doing?"

"…No," said the children.

"I want you to close your eyes and concentrate, and think to yourself 'I want to turn into a ghost'."

* * *

"This explanation session goes on for half an hour, give or take a second, but your mother successfully made her point, and you and Jazz take it well," explained Clockwork, "It's so boring and tediously mushy; even I fall asleep just by watching this,"

Danny, who has been munching away on a bowl of buttered popcorn (_good_ butter, I might add).

"You wanna fast forward while I refill my bowl?" Danny suggested.

"By all means."

Danny stood up. Clockwork shot a time beam at the screen, speeding up the tape up to the next good part.


	3. Chapter 3

"So if Dad's a halfa in the timeline, and me and Jazz are halfas as well because of it, who gets caught up in the Fenton Portal™ accident in my place?"

"I never said they still made the portal, Daniel."

"Oh."

"But then again, I never said they _didn't_."

* * *

Now Danny was 14, Jazz 16. The school they went to was co-ed in the expected fields, and then some. Particularly, living and dead. Yes: even ghosts attend Casper High. Danny and Jazz didn't feel alone, thankfully, as there were other halfas going there too—only these halfas are natural halfas: human mother and ghost father, or vice versa.

The siblings both had their own posses of friends they hung out with mornings before school and afterwards. Danny had goth girl Sam Manson and über nerd Tucker Foley, both fully human. Jazz, meanwhile was often seen with Amberline "Ember" McLain and Johnny "13" Golucky, both 100% dead. Many of the aforementioned halfas were jocks who acted like they owned the place just because they were "the best of both worlds" or something stupid.

The mornings before school were fun for the most part, good times were had by all. But for the ghosts…it was a bitch to get there. I mean they could set off for a naturally-forming portal, but they had no control of where—or even when—the portals would let them out. To this end, Jack often spent his free time going through his basement archive of blueprints, in search of the one for the old portal he made with Maddie and Vlad. The one that got him where he was today, so to speak. Maybe if he made another portal, he thought, then Jazz's ghost friends would have a more convenient way of getting here. All he needed to do was to multiply the parameters so that the portal would fit a one-story room top-to-bottom, and work from there. The weird part about this was that…_nobody asked him for it_. Jack's ESP must be kicking in again!

All the while, Maddie did a lot of thinking to herself. In the Fenton clan, she was the only one left that _wasn't_ a halfa. Of course, during her pregnancies with Danny and Jazz, she had the recurring bouts of sudden invisibility caused by the babies in her womb, but it never made her into a halfa outright. The weird part was that, in retrospect, she _missed _those bouts of sudden invisibility and wanted more. Like, say, the ability to fly and walk through walls. But how could she get ghost powers? As she pondered, she looked over Jack's shoulder to see his working on the revised ghost portal. At first, she was against Jack getting himself tangled up in _another_ accident, but then and an idea struck. Should the portal fire a beam of ectoplasm and electricity mixed on its first go, like it did on the last portal, Maddie would try to get _herself _within the beam, and bingo, ghost powers like her husband.

But then she scratched that thought. Jack upped the ante in the field of safety precautions when it came to testing new inventions, with Rule #1 being **STAND CLEAR**.

* * *

One day after school, Danny, Jazz, Sam and Johnny "13" were playing Mario Kart on the family's GameCube (the year is 2004, mind you), with Tucker and Ember silently cheering from behind the couch. Johnny came last place for the fourth race in a row. Then Jack appeared behind them: he didn't go unnoticed, thanks to the giant blubberous shadow he cast over the TV set.

"Hey kids!" he said proudly, "Uncle Jack's got a present for you in the basement!"

"What is it, _Dad_?" asked Danny, pressing PAUSE.

"It's so big…You wouldn't believe it if I just told you…Uh…JUST COME DOWN TO THE BASEMENT ALREADY!" Jack was obviously excited about…whatever he wanted to show the kids.

With only vague clues to guide them, the kids followed Jack downstairs, eventually followed by Maddie.

"Well, here it is! Whadaya think?" said Jack, proud.

On the wall was what appeared to be a portal. Almost like the one Jack built back at college, but with two exceptions. One, it was larger, and two, there were no lights or moving rays or whatever. There was a good explanation for the second exception: It wasn't turned on. Jack's audience were less than amazed.

"What is it?" said Sam.

"This is, or at least is _going_ to be, the Fenton Portal™," explained Jack enthusiastically, "It's our permanent gateway to the Ghost Zone!"

Only Danny's eyes opened up wide. Everybody else either coughed or yawned. Maddie showed signs of distaste, but was subconsciously cheering her on.

"Jack, honey," Maddie sighed, "I thought you vowed never to put yourself in danger with crazy inventions like this again. We all know what happened with the first portal: it took out _half_ your life!"

Jack walked over to his wife and spoke at a low volume so that the others won't correctly make out what he was going to say.

"I'm sorry honey, but I'm doing this for the kids and their friends. What's wrong with adding a bit of convenience to their lives/afterlives? Besides, I'm pretty sure what I did wrong last time, and I made some safety precautions to make sure it wouldn't happen again!"

Jack, finished, walked over to two parts of a plug and, ceremoniously, prepared to plug them into each other.

"Okay, everybody ready?" Jack declared.

The kids nodded unenthusiastically.

"Three…Two…One…**STAND BACK!**" Jack yammed the two plugs together, completing the circuit, and directed everyone's attention to the portal.

Nothing happened.

"Wait for it…"

Ten seconds passed. Then thirty seconds. Then a whole minute. _Still_ nothing. Then the kids got bored.

"Mario Kart?" Danny proposed.

His friends (and sister) brightened up again and followed him upstairs. Johnny "13" found himself at the back of the line again.

"Whelp, looks like I'll be Baby Mario again," he complained to himself.

Maddie and Jack were the only people left in the basement. Maddie gave Jack a deserved hug (not a much-deserved hug, just a regular one).

"Why don't you go get yourself some fudge. I'll stay here and clean up."

"Good idea, Madds. I might've just missed a switch or two," said Jack, winking.

The wink did not go unnoticed by Maddie.

* * *

"Gee, I didn't know Johnny's last name was Golucky!" said Danny in amazement.

"Well, it is in _that_ time line," Clockwork explained, "Now sit tight. Here comes the best part."


	4. Chapter 4 and Epilogue

Was Jack's wink some sort of clue? Was his ESP kicking in again? Maddie felt a hunch that her halfa husband purposefully missed a switch on the portal. But which one?

Then she saw it. On the inside of the inactive portal, near the edge, was the problem. The ON/OFF switch: it wasn't turned on. A thought struck Maddie. If she turned the portal on with a push of that one button, would she get her much desired ghost powers so she wouldn't feel so…left out? What if it outright killed her instead? A fine thing that'll be. A portal to the ghost zone that would kill her where it was set to only half kill her! But either way, she looked herself in the mirror before coming downstairs. She was a pretty sexy mother for her age. Maybe being a sexy ghost mother wouldn't be so bad after all. So Maddie, with her jumpsuit on for protection nonetheless, extended a shaking arm out, toward the ON button, pressed it, and…

* * *

Danny and Jazz sat on chairs next to a door. Jack paced back and forth in front of the door. He was very worried. Did his wife really kill herself trying to recreate the accident? Was his own status and his children's status as halfas really enough to drive the family matriarch over the edge? Perhaps he should've _let_ Vlad get caught in the crossfires of the photo portal, and let _him_ have all the luxuries of being both living and dead. Perhaps he should've stood out of the way of the beam as well, and nobody would become halfas, and this crisis would've never happened _at all_.

Jack was tired of pacing, he wanted to lie down and take a rest. But the lights illuminating the corridor he was pacing around in were so bright, he couldn't. He ended up just sitting next to Danny and Jazz. This was one slow hospital.

Finally, a doctor emerged from the door.

"Jack Fenton?" She said.

Jack rose from his seat.

"How is she?" Jack asked, showing obvious signs of desperation.

"You can relax," said the doctor, "Your wife is all right."

Jack couldn't help but hug the doctor.

She continued, "She just suffered from an electric shock and was unconscious for a few minutes. She's right as rain now."

The kids smiled and jumped up from their chairs. They replaced the doctor in Jack's bear hug. The doctor opened the door to Maddie's room, and led the others inside.

"Whenever you're ready," said the doctor, "You may pay the bill downstairs and she'll be free to leave the hospital."

They saw Maddie sitting up in the center of the bed, awaiting her family with open arms.

"Maddie!"

"Mom!"

"Mommy!" Danny's child side got the best of him here.

Maddie embraced them all in a gentle hug, then let go.

"What happened down there?" said Jazz, trying to be discreet as possible.

"Did the portal…you know?" Danny was more direct.

"If you mean turn me into a halfa…" their mother began.

She moved an arm close to the side table and amazed the kids as she willed her hand to pass through it without a twitch.

"…Yes it did."

Now Jack was as giddy as the kids. The whole family half-ghost at last! After a few more seconds of rejoicing, Jack settled the kids down and gave them a wad of money.

"Here," said Jack, "You go downstairs and pay the bill. I would like to be alone with my wife for a minute."

The smiles on Danny and Jazz disappeared. Seeing the seriousness of their father's demand, they silently left the room.

Finally alone, Maddie spoke to her husband.

"Jack, did you have the portal switched off knowing I wanted to be like you?"

Jack chuckled, as if he didn't know what she was talking about.

"Come on, now," Maddie continued, "We know you have ESP. If you didn't, the portal would've been on without a hitch. Or it would still have been of due to your occasional laziness."

It was true. Jack was sometimes lazy.

Jack smirked and chuckled one last time.

"Okay, you got me," he caved.

Maddie leaned forward and gave Jack a kiss.

"Thank you," she said softly, "For making your beloved happy."

With the bill finally paid, the Fentons left the hospital from the front. Seeing as the occasion called for it, they switched into their ghost forms (Maddie's similar to Jack's except her brown hair becoming blue) and flew upwards and off into the sunset.

* * *

"Geez," said Danny, somewhat disappointed, "That last bit seemed a little cliché."

"My idea, I'm afraid," said Clockwork regrettably, "The real ending to this story was boring and uneventful, I figured this would help the flashback end on a high note upon revisiting. In retrospect, I feel like I could've done better."

"Huh. That doesn't sound like you."

"That's probably because the writer of this fan fiction lives in a timeline where your life is a television show, and he's got a lot of catching up to do. He must be filling in the void with elements from a more recent show."

"Hmm… Makes sense."

* * *

**Meanwhile in _another _timeline…**

"Geez, Rick. I can't help but feel like this show is a rip-off!"

"I feel ya, Morty. An eccentric old guy and a misguided teenURRPager, watching TV from other dimensions? That's URRPour forte!"

"Do you think we-w-we have the right to sue?"

"Hang uh…hang on a sec…"

Rick pressed the INFO button on the TV remote. The display on the screen read _DANNY PHANTOM _(S3 E13) 2007

"Huh. I guess not. If anything, _they_ could be suing _us_!"

"Aw geez. It's really a slow day, waiting for that _Steven Universe_ movie to become available in our area."

"Yep. Whadaya say to another _Ball Fondlers_?"

"Alright, sure."

* * *

**_PLEASE_ do _not_ spoil the surprise crossover ending in your comments and reviews.**


End file.
